After the close of World War II, 24 senior leaders of the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the
Einsatzgruppen Trial in
1947–48, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes .
Fourteen death sentences and two life sentences were handed out. Four
additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were later tried and executed by
other nations.

As part of the drive to remove so-called "undesirable" elements from
the German population, from September to December 1939 the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and others took part in
Action T4Action T4 , a programme of
systematic murder of the physically and mentally handicapped and
psychiatric hospital patients undertaken by the Nazi regime. Action T4
mainly took place from 1939 to 1941, but the killings continued until
the end of the war. Initially the victims were shot by the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and others, but gas chambers were put into use by
spring 1940.

Numbering some 2,700 men at this point, the Einsatzgruppen's mission
was to kill members of the Polish leadership most clearly identified
with Polish national identity: the intelligentsia, members of the
clergy , teachers, and members of the nobility. As stated by Hitler:
"... there must be no Polish leaders; where Polish leaders exist they
must be killed, however harsh that sounds". The Sonderfahndungsbuch
Polen — lists of people to be killed — had been drawn up by the SS
as early as May 1939. The
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen performed these murders with
the support of the
Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz , a paramilitary group
consisting of ethnic Germans living in Poland. Members of the SS, the
WehrmachtWehrmacht , and the
Ordnungspolizei (Order Police; Orpo) also shot
civilians during the Polish campaign. Approximately 65,000 civilians
were killed by the end of 1939. In addition to leaders of Polish
society, they killed Jews, prostitutes,
Romani peopleRomani people , and the
mentally ill. Psychiatric patients in Poland were initially killed by
shooting, but by spring 1941 gas vans were widely used.

Seven
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen of battalion strength operated in Poland. Each
was subdivided into four Einsatzkommandos of company strength.

Though they were formally under the command of the army, the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen received their orders from Heydrich and for the most
part acted independently of the army. Many senior army officers were
only too glad to leave these genocidal actions to the task forces, as
the killings violated the rules of warfare as set down in the Geneva
Conventions . However, Hitler had decreed that the army would have to
tolerate and even offer logistical support to the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen when
it was tactically possible to do so. Some army commanders complained
about unauthorised shootings, looting, and rapes committed by members
of the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, to little
effect. For example, when
GeneraloberstGeneraloberstJohannes Blaskowitz sent a
memorandum of complaint to Hitler about the atrocities, Hitler
dismissed his concerns as "childish", and Blaskowitz was relieved of
his post in May 1940. He continued to serve in the army but never
received promotion to field marshal .

On 13 March 1941, in the lead-up to
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa , the
planned invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler dictated his "Guidelines
in
SpecialSpecial Spheres re: Directive No. 21 (Operation Barbarossa)".
Sub-paragraph B specified that
Reichsführer-SSHeinrich HimmlerHeinrich Himmler would
be given "special tasks" on direct orders from the Führer, which he
would carry out independently. This directive was intended to
prevent friction between the
WehrmachtWehrmacht and the SS in the upcoming
offensive. Hitler also specified that criminal acts against civilians
perpetrated by members of the
WehrmachtWehrmacht during the upcoming campaign
would not be prosecuted in the military courts, and thus would go
unpunished.

In a speech to his leading generals on 30 March 1941, Hitler
described his envisioned war against the Soviet Union. General Franz
Halder , the Army's Chief of Staff, described the speech:

Struggle between two ideologies. Scathing evaluation of Bolshevism,
equals antisocial criminality. Communism immense future danger ...
This a fight to the finish. If we do not accept this, we shall beat
the enemy, but in thirty years we shall again confront the Communist
foe. We don't make war to preserve the enemy ... Struggle against
Russia: Extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist
intelligentsia ... Commissars and GPU personnel are criminals and must
be treated as such. The struggle will differ from that in the west. In
the east harshness now means mildness for the future.

Though General Halder did not record any mention of Jews, German
historian
Andreas HillgruberAndreas Hillgruber argued that because of Hitler's frequent
contemporary statements about the coming war of annihilation against
"Judeo-Bolshevism ", his generals would have understood Hitler's call
for the destruction of the Soviet Union as also comprising a call for
the destruction of its Jewish population. The genocide was often
described using euphemisms such as "special tasks" and "executive
measures"; Einsatzgruppe victims were often described as having been
shot while trying to escape. In May 1941, Heydrich verbally passed on
the order to kill the Soviet
JewsJews to the SiPo NCO School in Pretzsch ,
where the commanders of the reorganised
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were being
trained for Operation Barbarossa. In spring 1941, Heydrich and the
First Quartermaster of the
WehrmachtWehrmacht Heer , General
Eduard Wagner ,
successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and the German Army to allow the implementation of the
"special tasks". Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on 28 April
1941, Field Marshal
Walther von Brauchitsch ordered that when
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa began, all German Army commanders were to
immediately identify and register all
JewsJews in occupied areas in the
Soviet Union, and fully co-operate with the Einsatzgruppen.

In further meetings held in June 1941 Himmler outlined to top SS
leaders the regime's intention to reduce the population of the Soviet
Union by 30 million people, not only through direct killing of those
considered racially inferior , but by depriving the remainder of food
and other necessities of life.

Heydrich acted under orders from
Reichsführer-SS Himmler, who
supplied security forces on an "as needed" basis to the local SS and
Police Leaders . Led by SD, Gestapo, and Kripo officers,
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen included recruits from the Orpo, Security Service and
Waffen-SS, augmented by uniformed volunteers from the local auxiliary
police force. Each Einsatzgruppe was supplemented with a reserve
battalion of Orpos and
Waffen-SSWaffen-SS as well as support personnel such as
drivers and radio operators. On average, the Orpo formations were
larger and better armed, with heavy machine-gun detachments, which
enabled them to carry out operations beyond the capability of the SS.
Each death squad followed an assigned army group as they advanced into
the Soviet Union. During the course of their operations, the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen commanders received assistance from the Wehrmacht.
Activities ranged from the murder of targeted groups of individuals
named on carefully prepared lists, to joint citywide operations with
SS
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen which lasted for two or more days, such as the
massacres at
Babi YarBabi Yar , perpetrated by the Orpo Reserve Battalion 45,
and at Rumbula , by Battalion 22, reinforced by local
Schutzmannschaften (auxiliary police). The SS brigades, wrote
historian
Christopher Browning , were "only the thin cutting edge of
German units that became involved in political and racial mass
murder."

Many Einsatzgruppe leaders were highly educated; for example, nine of
seventeen leaders of Einsatzgruppe A held doctorate degrees. Three
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were commanded by holders of doctorates, one of whom
(SS-
GruppenführerOtto Rasch ) held a double doctorate.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the
Einsatzgruppen's main assignment was to kill civilians, as in Poland,
but this time its targets specifically included Soviet Communist Party
commissars and Jews. In a letter dated 2 July 1941 Heydrich
communicated to his SS and Police Leaders that the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were
to execute all senior and middle ranking
Comintern officials; all
senior and middle ranking members of the central, provincial, and
district committees of the Communist Party; extremist and radical
Communist Party members; people\'s commissars ; and
JewsJews in party and
government posts. Open-ended instructions were given to execute "other
radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, snipers, assassins,
agitators, etc.)." He instructed that any pogroms spontaneously
initiated by the population of the occupied territories were to be
quietly encouraged.

On 8 July, Heydrich announced that all
JewsJews were to be regarded as
partisans, and gave the order for all male
JewsJews between the ages of 15
and 45 to be shot. On 17 July Heydrich ordered that the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were to kill all Jewish
Red ArmyRed Army prisoners of war, plus
all
Red ArmyRed Army prisoners of war from Georgia and Central Asia, as they
too might be Jews. Unlike in Germany, where the
Nuremberg LawsNuremberg Laws of
1935 defined as Jewish anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents,
the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen defined as Jewish anyone with at least one Jewish
grandparent; in either case, whether or not the person practised the
religion was irrelevant. The unit was also assigned to exterminate
Romani peopleRomani people and the mentally ill. It was common practice for the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen to shoot hostages. A teenage boy stands beside
his murdered family shortly before his own death by the SS.
Zboriv ,
Ukraine, 5 July 1941

As the invasion began, the Germans pursued the fleeing Red Army,
leaving a security vacuum. Reports surfaced of Soviet guerrilla
activity in the area, with local
JewsJews immediately suspected of
collaboration. Heydrich ordered his officers to incite anti-Jewish
pogroms in the newly occupied territories. Pogroms, some of which
were orchestrated by the Einsatzgruppen, broke out in
LatviaLatvia ,
LithuaniaLithuania , and
UkraineUkraine . Within the first few weeks of Operation
Barbarossa, 40 pogroms led to the deaths of 10,000 Jews, and by the
end of 1941 some 60 pogroms had taken place, claiming as many as
24,000 victims. However, SS-
BrigadeführerBrigadeführerFranz Walter StahleckerFranz Walter Stahlecker ,
commander of Einsatzgruppe A, reported to his superiors in mid-October
that the residents of
KaunasKaunas were not spontaneously starting pogroms,
and secret assistance by the Germans was required. A similar
reticence was noted by Einsatzgruppe B in Russia and Belarus and
Einsatzgruppe C in Ukraine; the further east the Einsatzgruppen
travelled, the less likely the residents were to be prompted into
killing their Jewish neighbours.

All four main
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen took part in mass shootings from the
early days of the war. Initially the targets were adult Jewish men,
but by August the net had been widened to include women, children, and
the elderly—the entire Jewish population. Initially there was a
semblance of legality given to the shootings, with trumped-up charges
being read out (arson, sabotage, black marketeering, or refusal to
work, for example) and victims being killed by a firing squad. As this
method proved too slow, the Einsatzkommandos began to take their
victims out in larger groups and shot them next to, or even inside,
mass graves that had been prepared. Some Einsatzkommandos started to
use automatic weapons, with survivors being killed with a pistol shot.

As word of the massacres got out, many
JewsJews fled; in Ukraine, 70 to
90 per cent of the
JewsJews ran away. This was seen by the leader of
Einsatzkommando VI as beneficial, as it would save the regime the
costs of deporting the victims further east over the Urals. In other
areas the invasion was so successful that the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen had
insufficient forces to immediately kill all the
JewsJews in the conquered
territories. A situation report from Einsatzgruppe C in September
1941 noted that not all
JewsJews were members of the Bolshevist apparatus,
and suggested that the total elimination of Jewry would have a
negative impact on the economy and the food supply. The Nazis began to
round their victims up into concentration camps and ghettos and rural
districts were for the most part rendered
Judenfrei (free of Jews).
Jewish councils were set up in major cities and forced labour gangs
were established to make use of the
JewsJews as slave labour until they
were totally eliminated, a goal that was postponed until 1942.

The
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen used public hangings as a terror tactic against
the local population. An Einsatzgruppe B report, dated 9 October 1941,
described one such hanging. Due to suspected partisan activity near
Demidov, all male residents aged 15 to 55 were put in a camp to be
screened. The screening produced seventeen people who were identified
as "partisans" and "Communists". Five members of the group were hanged
while 400 local residents were assembled to watch; the rest were shot.

The largest mass shooting perpetrated by the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen took
place on 29 and 30 September 1941 at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of
KievKiev , a city in
UkraineUkraine that had fallen to the Germans on 19
September. The perpetrators included a company of
Waffen-SSWaffen-SS attached
to Einsatzgruppe C under Rasch, members of Sonderkommando 4a under
SS-
ObergruppenführerFriedrich Jeckeln , and some Ukrainian auxiliary
police. The
JewsJews of
KievKiev were told to report to a certain street
corner on 29 September; anyone who disobeyed would be shot. Since word
of massacres in other areas had not yet reached
KievKiev and the assembly
point was near the train station, they assumed they were being
deported. People showed up at the rendezvous point in large numbers,
laden with possessions and food for the journey.

After being marched two miles north-west of the city centre, the
victims encountered a barbed wire barrier and numerous Ukrainian
police and German troops. Thirty or forty people at a time were told
to leave their possessions and were escorted through a narrow
passageway lined with soldiers brandishing clubs. Anyone who tried to
escape was beaten. Soon the victims reached an open area, where they
were forced to strip, and then were herded down into the ravine.
People were forced to lie down in rows on top of the bodies of other
victims, and they were shot in the back of the head or the neck by
members of the execution squads.

The murders continued for two days, claiming a total of 33,771
victims. Sand was shovelled and bulldozed over the bodies and the
sides of the ravine were dynamited to bring down more material. Anton
Heidborn, a member of Sonderkommando 4a, later testified that three
days later that there were still people alive among the corpses.
Heidborn spent the next few days helping smooth out the "millions" of
banknotes taken from the victims' possessions. The clothing was taken
away, destined to be re-used by German citizens. Jeckeln's troops
shot more than 100,000
JewsJews by the end of October.

Einsatzgruppe A operated in the formerly Soviet-occupied Baltic
states of
EstoniaEstonia , Latvia, and Lithuania. According to its own
reports to Himmler, Einsatzgruppe A killed almost 140,000 people in
the five months following the invasion: 136,421 Jews, 1,064
Communists, 653 people with mental illnesses, 56 partisans, 44 Poles,
five Gypsies, and one Armenian were reported killed between 22 June
and 25 November 1941.

Upon entering
KaunasKaunas , Lithuania, on 25 June 1941, the Einsatzgruppe
released the criminals from the local jail and encouraged them to join
the pogrom which was underway. Between 23–27 June 1941, 4,000 Jews
were killed on the streets of
KaunasKaunas and in nearby open pits and
ditches. Particularly active in the
KaunasKaunas pogrom was the so-called
"Death Dealer of Kaunas", a young man who murdered
JewsJews with a crowbar
at the Lietukis Garage before a large crowd that cheered each killing
with much applause; he occasionally paused to play the Lithuanian
national anthem "
Tautiška giesmė " on his accordion before resuming
the killings.

As Einsatzgruppe A advanced into Lithuania, it actively recruited
local nationalists and antisemitic groups. In July 1941, members of
the Baltaraisciai movement joined the massacres. A pogrom in
RigaRiga in
early July killed 400 Jews. Latvian nationalist
Viktors Arājs and his
supporters undertook a campaign of arson against synagogues. On 2
July, Einsatzgruppe A commander Stahlecker appointed Arājs to head
the
Arajs Kommando , a Sonderkommando of about 300 men, mostly
university students. Together, Einsatzgruppe A and the Arājs Kommando
killed 2,300
JewsJews in
RigaRiga on 6–7 July. Within six months, Arājs
and his men would kill about half of Latvia's Jewish population.

Local officials, the Selbstschutz, and the Hilfspolizei (Auxiliary
Police) played a key role in rounding up and massacring Jewish
Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians. These groups helped the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and other killing units to quickly identify Jews. The
Hilfspolizei, consisting of auxiliary police organised by the Germans
and recruited from former Latvian Army and police officers,
ex-
Aizsargi , members of the
Pērkonkrusts , and university students,
assisted in the murder of Latvia's Jewish citizens. Similar units
were created elsewhere, and provided much of the manpower for the
Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

With the creation of units such as the Arājs Kommando and the
Rollkommando Hamann in Lithuania, the attacks changed from the
spontaneous mob violence of the pogroms to more systematic massacres.
With extensive local help, Einsatzgruppe A was the first Einsatzgruppe
to attempt to systematically exterminate all the
JewsJews in its area.
Latvian historian
Modris Eksteins wrote:

Of the roughly 83,000
JewsJews who fell into German hands in Latvia, not
more than 900 survived; and of the more than 20,000 Western
JewsJews sent
into Latvia, only some 800 lived through the deportation until
liberation. This was the highest percentage of eradication in all of
Europe.

In late 1941, the Einsatzkommandos settled into headquarters in Kovno
, Riga, and
TallinnTallinn . Einsatzgruppe A grew less mobile and faced
problems because of its small size. The Germans relied increasingly on
the Arājs Kommando and similar groups to perform massacres of Jews.

Such extensive and enthusiastic collaboration with the Einsatzgruppen
has been attributed to several factors. Since the Russian Revolution
of 1905 , the
Kresy Wschodnie and other borderlands had experienced a
political culture of violence. The period of Soviet rule had been
profoundly traumatic for residents of the
Baltic statesBaltic states and areas that
had been part of Poland until 1939; the population was brutalised and
terrorised by the imposed Soviet rule, and the existing familiar
structures of society were destroyed.

Historian Erich Haberer notes that many survived and made sense of
the "totalitarian atomization" of society by seeking conformity with
communism. As a result, by the time of the German invasion in 1941,
many had come to see conformity with a totalitarian regime as socially
acceptable behaviour; thus, people simply transferred their allegiance
to the German regime when it arrived. Some who had collaborated with
the Soviet regime sought to divert attention from themselves by naming
JewsJews as collaborators and killing them.
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen SD issued
and used dog-tag.

In November 1941 Himmler was dissatisfied with the pace of the
exterminations in Latvia, as he intended to move
JewsJews from Germany
into the area. He assigned SS-
Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, one of the
perpetrators of the
Babi YarBabi Yar massacre, to liquidate the
RigaRiga ghetto .
Jeckeln selected a site about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) southeast of Riga
near the Rumbula railway station, and had 300 Russian prisoners of war
prepare the site by digging pits in which to bury the victims. Jeckeln
organised around 1,700 men, including 300 members of the Arajs
Kommando, 50 German SD men, and 50 Latvian guards, most of whom had
already participated in mass killings of civilians. These troops were
supplemented by Latvians, including members of the
RigaRiga city police,
battalion police, and ghetto guards. Around 1,500 able-bodied Jews
would be spared execution so their slave labour could be exploited; a
thousand men were relocated to a fenced-off area within the ghetto and
500 women were temporarily housed in a prison and later moved to a
separate nearby ghetto, where they were put to work mending uniforms.

Although Rumbula was on the rail line, Jeckeln decided that the
victims should travel on foot from
RigaRiga to the execution ground.
Trucks and buses were arranged to carry children and the elderly. The
victims were told that they were being relocated, and were advised to
bring up to 20 kilograms (44 lb) of possessions. The first day of
executions, 30 November 1941, began with the perpetrators rousing and
assembling the victims at 4:00 am. The victims were moved in columns
of a thousand people toward the execution ground. As they walked, some
SS men went up and down the line, shooting people who could not keep
up the pace or who tried to run away or rest.

When the columns neared the prepared execution site, the victims were
driven some 270 metres (300 yd) from the road into the forest, where
any possessions that had not yet been abandoned were seized. Here the
victims were split into groups of fifty and taken deeper into the
forest, near the pits, where they were ordered to strip. The victims
were driven into the prepared trenches, made to lie down, and shot in
the head or the back of the neck by members of Jeckeln's bodyguard.
Around 13,000
JewsJews from
RigaRiga were killed at the pits that day, along
with a thousand
JewsJews from Berlin who had just arrived by train. On the
second day of the operation, 8 December 1941, the remaining 10,000
JewsJews of
RigaRiga were killed in the same way. About a thousand were killed
on the streets of the city or on the way to the site, bringing the
total deaths for the two-day extermination to 25,000 people. For his
part in organising the massacre, Jeckeln was promoted to Leader of the
SS Upper Section, Ostland .

SECOND SWEEP

Einsatzgruppe B, C, and D did not immediately follow Einsatzgruppe
A's example in systematically killing all
JewsJews in their areas. The
Einsatzgruppe commanders, with the exception of Einsatzgruppe A's
Stahlecker, were of the opinion by the fall of 1941 that it was
impossible to kill the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union in
one sweep, and thought the killings should stop. An Einsatzgruppe
report dated 17 September advised that the Germans would be better off
using any skilled
JewsJews as labourers rather than shooting them. Also,
in some areas poor weather and a lack of transportation led to a
slowdown in deportations of
JewsJews from points further west. Thus, an
interval passed between the first round of
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen massacres in
summer and fall, and what American historian
Raul Hilberg called the
second sweep, which started in December 1941 and lasted into the
summer of 1942. During the interval, the surviving
JewsJews were forced
into ghettos.

Einsatzgruppe A had already murdered almost all
JewsJews in its area, so
it shifted its operations into Belarus to assist Einsatzgruppe B. In
Dnepropetrovsk in February 1942, Einsatzgruppe D reduced the city's
Jewish population from 30,000 to 702 over the course of four days.
The German Order Police and local collaborators provided the extra
manpower needed to perform all the shootings. Haberer wrote that, as
in the Baltic states, the Germans could not have killed so many Jews
so quickly without local help. He points out that the ratio of Order
Police to auxiliaries was 1 to 10 in both
UkraineUkraine and Belarus. In
rural areas the proportion was 1 to 20. This meant that most Ukrainian
and Belarusian
JewsJews were killed by fellow Ukrainians and Belarusians
commanded by German officers rather than by Germans.

The second wave of exterminations in the Soviet Union met with armed
resistance in some areas, though the chance of success was poor.
Weapons were typically primitive or home-made. Communications were
impossible between ghettos in various cities, so there was no way to
create a unified strategy. Few in the ghetto leadership supported
resistance for fear of reprisals on the ghetto residents. Mass
break-outs were sometimes attempted, though survival in the forest was
nearly impossible due to the lack of food and the fact that escapees
were often tracked down and killed.

After a time, Himmler found that the killing methods used by the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were inefficient: they were costly, demoralising for
the troops, and sometimes did not kill the victims quickly enough.
Many of the troops found the massacres to be difficult if not
impossible to perform. Some of the perpetrators suffered physical and
mental health problems, and many turned to drink. As much as
possible, the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen leaders militarized the genocide. The
historian Christian Ingrao notes an attempt was made to make the
shootings a collective act without individual responsibility. Framing
the shootings in this way was not psychologically sufficient for every
perpetrator to feel absolved of guilt. Browning notes three
categories of potential perpetrators: those who were eager to
participate right from the start, those who participated in spite of
moral qualms because they were ordered to do so, and a significant
minority who refused to take part. A few men spontaneously became
excessively brutal in their killing methods and their zeal for the
task. Commander of Einsatzgruppe D, SS-
GruppenführerOtto Ohlendorf ,
particularly noted this propensity towards excess, and ordered that
any man who was too eager to participate or too brutal should not
perform any further executions.

During a visit to
MinskMinsk in August 1941, Himmler witnessed an
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen mass execution first-hand and concluded that shooting
JewsJews was too stressful for his men. By November he made arrangements
for any SS men suffering ill health from having participated in
executions to be provided with rest and mental health care. He also
decided a transition should be made to gassing the victims, especially
the women and children, and ordered the recruitment of expendable
native auxiliaries who could assist with the murders. Gas vans,
which had been used previously to kill mental patients, began to see
service by all four main
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen from 1942. However, the gas
vans were not popular with the Einsatzkommandos, because removing the
dead bodies from the van and burying them was a horrible ordeal.
Prisoners or auxiliaries were often assigned to do this task so as to
spare the SS men the trauma. Some of the early mass killings at
extermination camps used carbon monoxide fumes produced by diesel
engines, similar to the method used in gas vans, but by as early as
September 1941 experiments were begun at
AuschwitzAuschwitz using
Zyklon BZyklon B , a
cyanide-based pesticide gas.

Plans for the total eradication of the Jewish population of
Europe—eleven million people—were formalised at the Wannsee
Conference , held on 20 January 1942. Some would be worked to death ,
and the rest would be killed in the implementation of the Final
Solution of the
Jewish question (German: Die Endlösung der
Judenfrage). Permanent killing centres at Auschwitz,
BelzecBelzec , Sobibor
,
TreblinkaTreblinka , and other Nazi extermination camps replaced mobile death
squads as the primary method of mass killing. The Einsatzgruppen
remained active, however, and were put to work fighting partisans,
particularly in Belarus.

After the fall of Stalingrad in February 1943, Himmler realised that
Germany would likely lose the war, and ordered the formation of a
special task force, Sonderkommando 1005 , under SS-Standartenführer
Paul BlobelPaul Blobel . The unit's assignment was to visit mass graves all along
the Eastern Front to exhume bodies and burn them in an attempt to
cover up the genocide. The task remained unfinished at the end of the
war, and many mass graves remain unmarked and unexcavated.

Jäger's report provides an almost daily running total of the
liquidations of 137,346 people, the vast majority of them Jews. The
report documents the exact date and place of massacres, the number of
victims, and their breakdown into categories (Jews, Communists,
criminals, and so on). Women were shot from the very beginning, but
initially in fewer numbers than men. Children were first included in
the tally starting in mid-August, when 3,207 people were murdered in
RokiškisRokiškis on 15–16 August 1941. For the most part the report does
not give any military justification for the killings; people were
killed solely because they were Jews. In total, the report lists over
100 executions in 71 different locations. Jäger wrote: "I can state
today that the goal of solving the Jewish problem in
LithuaniaLithuania has
been reached by
Einsatzkommando 3. There are no more
JewsJews in
Lithuania, apart from working
JewsJews and their families." In a February
1942 addendum to the report, Jäger increased the total number of
victims to 138,272, giving a breakdown of 48,252 men, 55,556 women,
and 34,464 children. Only 1,851 of the victims were non-Jewish.

Jäger escaped capture by the Allies when the war ended. He lived in
Heidelberg under his own name until his report was discovered in March
1959. Arrested and charged, Jäger committed suicide on 22 June 1959
in a Hohenasperg prison while awaiting trial for his crimes.

The killings took place with the knowledge and support of the German
Army in the east. On 10 October 1941 Field Marshal Walther von
Reichenau drafted an order to be read to the German Sixth Army on the
Eastern Front. Now known as the
Severity Order , it read in part:

The most important objective of this campaign against the
Jewish-Bolshevik system is the complete destruction of its sources of
power and the extermination of the Asiatic influence in European
civilization ... In this eastern theatre, the soldier is not only a
man fighting in accordance with the rules of the art of war, but also
the ruthless standard bearer of a national conception ... For this
reason the soldier must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for
the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman
species of Jewry.

Field Marshal
Gerd von RundstedtGerd von Rundstedt of
Army Group SouthArmy Group South expressed his
"complete agreement" with the order. He sent out a circular to the
generals under his command urging them to release their own versions
and to impress upon their troops the need to exterminate the Jews.
General
Erich von MansteinErich von Manstein , in an order to his troops on 20 November,
stated that "the Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once
and for all." Manstein sent a letter to Einsatzgruppe D commanding
officer Ohlendorf complaining that it was unfair that the SS was
keeping all of the murdered Jews' wristwatches for themselves instead
of sharing with the army.

Beyond this trivial complaint, the Army and the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen worked
closely and effectively. On 6 July 1941
Einsatzkommando 4b of
Einsatzgruppe C reported that "Armed forces surprisingly welcome
hostility against the Jews". Few complaints about the killings were
ever raised by
WehrmachtWehrmacht officers. On 8 September, Einsatzgruppe D
reported that relations with the German Army were "excellent". In the
same month, Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A wrote that Army Group North
had been exemplary in co-operating with the exterminations and that
relations with the
4th Panzer Army , commanded by General Erich
Hoepner , were "very close, almost cordial". In the south, the
Romanian Army worked closely with Einsatzgruppe D to massacre
Ukrainian Jews, killing around 26,000
JewsJews in the Odessa massacre .
The German historian
Peter Longerich thinks it probable that the
Wehrmacht, along with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN), incited the
Lviv pogroms , during which 8,500 to 9,000 Jews
were killed by the native population and Einsatzgruppe C in July 1941.
Moreover, most people on the home front in Germany had some idea of
the massacres being committed by the Einsatzgruppen. British
historian
Hugh Trevor-RoperHugh Trevor-Roper noted that although Himmler had forbidden
photographs of the killings, it was common for both the men of the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen and for bystanders to take pictures to send to their
loved ones, which he felt suggested widespread approval of the
massacres.

Officers in the field were well aware of the killing operations being
conducted by the Einsatzgruppen. The
WehrmachtWehrmacht tried to justify their
considerable involvement in the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen massacres as being
anti-partisan operations rather than racist attacks, but Hillgruber
wrote that this was just an excuse. He states that those German
generals who claimed that the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were a necessary
anti-partisan response were lying, and maintained that the slaughter
of about 2.2 million defenceless civilians for reasons of racist
ideology cannot be justified.

EINSATZGRUPPEN TRIAL

After the close of World War II, 24 senior leaders of the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen were prosecuted in the
Einsatzgruppen Trial in
1947–48, part of the Subsequent
Nuremberg TrialsNuremberg Trials held under United
States military authority. The men were charged with crimes against
humanity , war crimes , and membership in the SS (which had been
declared a criminal organization). Fourteen death sentences and two
life sentences were among the judgments; only four executions were
carried out, on 7 June 1951; the rest were reduced to lesser
sentences. Four additional Einsatzgruppe leaders were later tried and
executed by other nations.
Otto Ohlendorf , 1943

Several
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen leaders, including Ohlendorf, claimed at the
trial to have received an order before
Operation BarbarossaOperation Barbarossa requiring
them to murder all Soviet Jews. To date no evidence has been found
that such an order was ever issued. German prosecutor Alfred Streim
noted that if such an order had been given, post-war courts would only
have been able to convict the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen leaders as accomplices to
mass murder. However, if it could be established that the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen had committed mass murder without orders, then they
could have been convicted as perpetrators of mass murder, and hence
could have received stiffer sentences, including capital punishment.

Streim postulated that the existence of an early comprehensive order
was a fabrication created for use in Ohlendorf's defence. This theory
is now widely accepted by historians. Longerich notes that most
orders received by the
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen leaders—especially when they
were being ordered to carry out criminal activities—were vague, and
couched in terminology that had a specific meaning for members of the
regime. Leaders were given briefings about the need to be "severe" and
"firm"; all
JewsJews were to be viewed as potential enemies that had to be
dealt with ruthlessly. British historian Sir
Ian KershawIan Kershaw argues that
Hitler's apocalyptic remarks before Barbarossa about the necessity for
a war without mercy to "annihilate" the forces of "Judeo-Bolshevism"
were interpreted by
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen commanders as permission and
encouragement to engage in extreme antisemitic violence, with each
EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen commander to use his own discretion about how far he
was prepared to go.

Most of the perpetrators of Nazi war crimes were never charged, and
returned unremarked to civilian life. The West German Central
Prosecution Office of Nazi War Criminals only charged about a hundred
former Einsatzgruppe members with war crimes. And as time went on, it
became more difficult to obtain prosecutions; witnesses grew older and
were less likely to be able to offer valuable testimony. Funding for
trials was inadequate, and the governments of
AustriaAustria and Germany
became less interested in obtaining convictions for wartime events,
preferring to forget the Nazi past.